As far as consumer trends are concerned, evidence of economic slowdown has a range of identifiable stages. These used to be lumped together under the heading “discretionary spending”. However, in recent years it has become clear that a more refined definition is needed.



The most obvious first target for a family feeling the economic pressures of recession is at least one, if not both of the holidays that they embark upon. It is perfectly possible to enjoy well-earned rest in and around the home, rather than jet off to some leisure resort. Thus one expenditure that does hold up, if not in fact increase, is that on home entertainment systems and subscriptions. Certainly, the cutback in spending on vacations has been hitting the European travel industry particularly hard, and a significant number of holiday firms have been forced to close their doors or merge with each other.



The next saving a family will seek is in the home. The new, bigger house or apartment or the radical improvements to their existing home are in truth, for most families, nice-to-haves and not essential.  Even a couple with a growing family can probably do without the extra kids’s room, until income and prospects pick up.



Automobiles are essential in most countries, even those, such as Holland, which enjoy fast and efficient public transport services. Changing the car every year is an extra expense that is easily cut. Cars are built to last for at least ten years. The fact that a family is driving around in an old model has no impact on anything in its life, except perhaps to prove that saving money in difficult times is a task that is being taken seriously. 



Now comes food and clothing.  World demand is already driving up the cost of basic foodstuffs, so at first sight economies may be hard to find.  But in reality, in the boom times, when recession seemed unthinkable, the weekly shop for many people included expensive, top of the range foods which may have been marginally nicer, but were not really worth the extra money. Moreover, people tended to buy far more food than they needed, so the regular freezer clear-outs saw shelves of once good food thrown into the trash. Nowadays such awful waste is less the case.



The final frontier of discretionary spending, the segment that no one ever expected would experience sever cutbacks, is mobile telephony. The smartphone has become such an embedded part of daily life in so many countries, especially those with an inadequate landline system, that it has always seemed inconceivable that expenditure would ever level out, let alone fall.



But this is what has happened. The once seemingly unstoppable growth in mobile phone sales actually declined by 1.7 percent, to 1.75 billion handsets. Moreover, within that figure, the proportion of smartphones, which dominate sales here in the Kingdom, have not been rising internationally as quickly as the industry predicted.  The truth it appears is that as consumers continue to feel the pinch, many are focusing their social networking activities on their laptops or desktops rather than the latest tablets or smartphones. Why buy the best phone and the biggest data package for something that is already available in the home?  For the moment - at least - it seems that mobile phones may be retreating to their good old-fashioned origins, which is simply to make and receive telephone calls.